Workplace Equality Is Good for Business

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304527504579172302377638002-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwMjEwNDIyWj

by coloneltcb • 13 years ago

73 137 13 years ago

online.wsj.com

kylelibra• 13 years ago

Tim Cook's point carries over to customers as well. For me, knowing a company is taking a progressive stance on human and civil rights goes a long way towards how I view them.

DalekBaldwin• 13 years ago

I think you've summed up the goal of this PR piece.

001sky• 13 years ago

Yes, easiliy confirmed. This is the NYT headline.

Senate Vote on Workplace Bias Against Gays a Test for G.O.P.

pdonis30• 13 years ago

But if that's the goal, why does the piece end by asking the government to pass anti-discrimination laws? What does that have to do with positive PR for Cook and Apple? As someone else pointed out upthread, if Cook really believes what he's saying, the last thing he should want is for the government to force his competitors to do what's good for their business; he should be happy to let them go out of business, leaving more customers for him.

alexeisadeski313• 13 years ago

I for one like the idea of people being able to hire whomever they like for whatever reasons they like.

Let the bigots expose themselves and be punished or not.

coralreef• 13 years ago

"or not"?

alexeisadeski313• 13 years ago

Just because I want something to happen doesn't mean that it must be so.

IBM2• 13 years ago

That's probably an idea that would resonate with lots of people with strong libertarian leanings here on HN and in Silicon Valley. However, like many libertarian positions, it's out of touch with reality. This isn't an issue that the invisible hand is going to fix.

mistermann7• 13 years ago

I'm curious why you think this....if "bigoted" ideas are delusional, shouldn't the fact that we have far more integration and exposure to different sub-cultures in sufficient time eliminate all bigotry, as it will eventually become self-evident that there are in fact no differences between people?

And if not, what might it be about this sub-group of people that will never ever "get it" - what's different about them that they simply can't?

pdonis30• 13 years ago

This isn't an issue that the invisible hand is going to fix.

Then why is the WSJ article titled "Workplace Equality Is Good For Business?" Shouldn't it be titled "Workplace Equality Is Good, But We Need To Force Businesses To Do It By Law"?

arrrg• 13 years ago

Are you arguing that all currently protected classes (e.g. race, religion, sex) should be abolished? That would to me be a logically coherent and non-bigoted (well, sort of, at least if the belief that the market can solve this problem and the belief that it is a problem is behind it) view of current policy. One I disagree with, but also one I can respect.

However, that’s not typically what the argument is about. Those who are opposed to this are often not opposed to other (either some or all) protected classes. That, to me, seems like an untenable view. You cannot have religion and sex as a protected class but not sexual orientation.

If I look at the protected classes I see one very obvious and big gap and that’s sexual orientation. It’s unquestionably incredibly bad policy to selectively exclude that (that is, if you are not a bigot).

alexeisadeski313• 13 years ago

Are you arguing that all currently protected classes (e.g. race, religion, sex) should be abolished?

Yes.

Realize that it's a reactionary position to take, but it just seems right. If someone wants to run their business with bigotry, so be it. I won't respect them, but I'd respect their "right" to do so.

I realize that there counter argument is that I've never lived in a time in which such regulation was needed, I never experienced Jim Crow, etc - and of course today Jim Crow still exists, in a way, for homosexuals.

But it just seems like another case of "two wrongs make a right." Forcing others to adhere to our own moral preferences seems fundamentally and deeply flawed. There must be another way.

Jayschwa3• 13 years ago

Maybe we should swap out religion for sexual orientation. At least the latter is genetic (like race and sex).

acjohnson552• 13 years ago

I can't tell you how absurdly naive (or disingenuous) that sounds to people who don't happen to be white, straight males. Entire generations have lived and died while the invisible hand does its work, if in fact that work is to increase inclusion in the first place.

MarkMc• 13 years ago

I don't think alexeisadeski3 is saying that the invisible hand will resolve the problem of bigotry in the workplace. Rather, I think his/her argument is that it is imperative that people be allowed to make an offer to one group of people but not another. I disagree with such an argument but I don't see it as naive or disingenuous (although I must admit to being a white, straight male).

yuhong2• 13 years ago

Personally, I do think the current anti-discrimination laws are probably fundamentally flawed.

derleth6• 13 years ago

Every business requires public resources to maintain. The police, to guard their warehouses? The trained fire department, to reduce their insurance rates to something manageable? The roads and water and power infrastructure? They didn't build that. The amount of taxes they paid didn't fund even a hundredth of what that cost.

So why should my taxes go to help fund their bigotry?

mistermann7• 13 years ago

And they might ask, why should their taxes go to fund your social engineering projects and restrict their freedoms?

alexeisadeski313• 13 years ago

This is the ultimate "two wrongs make a right" argument.

daughart4• 13 years ago

If a bigot makes a product I want, I have to punish myself in the act of punishing them. If instead they are "punished" for being bigoted (or better, disallowed from acting bigoted), the punishment is no longer mutual. This is proper, since my position of antidiscrimination is not worthy of punishment.

tsotha4• 13 years ago

If it's so good for business why does he think we need a legal structure to punish companies that just hire whoever they want?

21echoes4• 13 years ago

because oftentimes you need external pressure to force the issue. to some employers, they don't even care if it's potentially better for business, they're "not gonna hire a bunch of fags".

additionally, the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy means that the free market is ill-equipped to encourage good employment behavior.

alexeisadeski313• 13 years ago

That a policy recommendation does not result in utopia is not a counter argument.

erichocean• 13 years ago

Many people believe that the greatest good for everyone simply cannot be achieved without some degree of violence actively directed towards a few.

icambron5• 13 years ago

Do you think that discrimination against blacks and women was good for business? I submit that it was not, but companies did it anyway, because they were not rational. I'm not sure we should expect them to be now.

I also submit that if you think discriminating against blacks and women was good for business (a defensible claim), then you probably ought to be disagreeing with Tim Cook about whether sexual-orientation-based discrimination is good for businesses [1]. In my view, that would make the case for anti-discrimination legislation stronger, not weaker, because if both prevailing biases and good business sense favors discrimination, then we really need to act.[2]

[1] Perhaps you could believe the former but not the latter. They seem pretty parallel to me though, so I'd be curious what you thought the differences were.

[2] You could disagree with this too and simply be a lassez-faire fundamentalist, but that would render your original question kind of pointless.

verteu• 13 years ago

Discrimination imposes an extra cost on the discriminator. In a free market, firms that engage in irrational discrimination will be driven out of business. This is a central thesis of "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman.

tsotha4• 13 years ago

All I'm saying is his logic isn't, well, logical. On the one hand he says Apple's policy has been great for business, which would imply other companies should be adopting these kinds of policies without any kind of prodding from the government.

And yet he supports a law to force everyone to adopt those policies. It's like he doesn't actually believe "workplace equality" is good for business and would like to use the government to level the playing field he tilted against himself. If he really believed the policy was good for the bottom line, from a financial perspective he'd be overjoyed to compete against companies that don't have a similar policy.

pdonis30• 13 years ago

I'm not sure we should expect them to be now.

If you really believe this, then your response should not be to ask the government to pass laws forcing such companies to be "rational". Your response should be to start a "rational" company that out-competes them, by hiring all the talented people that can't get jobs at the bigoted company, and thereby drive the bigoted company out of business.

joelgrus• 13 years ago

"We've found that when people feel valued for who they are, they have the comfort and confidence to create a monstrosity like iTunes."

reion• 13 years ago

I through this one is a no-brainer.

jpeg_hero• 13 years ago

Good for Cook. With this piece he is taking a step towards synchronizing his public/personal. Not easy to do. But good he's making steps in that direction.

Yeah, he's "out" but he's not really "out."

Good for him for taking a step.

crassus• 13 years ago

As a conservative who hides his political beliefs in the tech sector, while my coworkers freely swap progressive political articles over the company's email lists, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Cook.

If the government prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of religion, then why not also political beliefs? There is little difference between the two.

djur12• 13 years ago

Have you experienced discrimination, or just the fear of social ostracism?

daughart4• 13 years ago

I agree. Sexual orientation, however, rises above political belief and religion as a matter of personal identity. In other words, it should be clear that discrimination for reasons of gender, race, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, and genetic information should be illegal. If you're going to move above that and ban other forms of discrimination, religion and politics are a natural extension.

daughart4• 13 years ago

Tim's argument is really more from the perspective of human rights than economic justification. The link to economic activity is only that, "we undermine people's potential and deny ourselves and our society the full benefits of those individuals' talents." The cost of this is distributed and small (to the company), and therefore he is not making the argument that companies that do not discriminate will out-compete companies that do. He is making the more subtle argument that increased human flourishing and creativity that result from antidiscrimination laws are good for business. The title is misleading and the argument is muddled - advocates of Tim's position would do well to avoid this line of argumentation and make the stronger point:

Antidiscrimination laws advance human flourishing and cause our society to be more just. Therefore they are worth having.

Workplace Equality Is Good for Business

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